“Ontology”
• The word comes from philosophy:
• “the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being”
• In practice they are:
• A set of concepts, definitions and inter-relationships.
• (The dividing line between “controlled vocabulary”, “thesaurus”, “ontology” is
hazy and not terribly important for practical purposes.)
• We have hundreds of ontologies in biology, e.g. see:
• http://www.obofoundry.org (100+)
• http://bioportal.bioontology.org (500+)